Oxygen sellers are demanding that trees stop providing oxygen for free, as it reduces the demand for their paid services

I once went to "Living Tomorrow", which a house demonstrating possible future technology in the Netherlands. They had a washing machine which could select the washing programming based on the RFID tagged clothes you put in it, and which could warn you if you tried to put incompatible stuff in there.

Other applications would be sending an email to your fridge to ask how much milk you have got left when you are in the supermarket, etc.

RFID has some really cool applications, as well as some really scary ones

The idea is to make multiple versions, so you can sell the cheap version to people who can't or won't afford the normal version, and the normal version to people who can. If they had only the normal version, the "cheap" people would buy nothing. If they make the normal version cheaper, everyone will buy it, including the people who where willing to pay more. This way they can maximize profit. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html for a very good explanation of this principle